“In the garden?”
“No. They’re visiting Maude’s niece outside London while I’m here.” She looked at him pointedly. “Why are you here?”
He stretched and folded his arms beneath his head. “You walked away when I tried to talk to you during the party. I thought since you wouldn’t come to me…” He shrugged.
“Moll will be back soon.”
“No. I gave her enough coin to stay away for the night.”
Her eyes widened in outrage. “You can’t do that! Where will she stay? She’s been looking forward all day to a nice bed.”
“Well, I did offer her mine.”
“Humph.” She pursed her lips, still not mollified. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll not be staying the night in any case. Besides,” she hurried on before he could object, “you misunderstood my original question: why are you here at the house party?”
“To find the real murderer,” he said wearily. Frankly, after two weeks of the subject, he’d grown a little tired of it. He gestured to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“Because it would be quite improper,” she said, and he wondered if she actually thought that or was simply making up etiquette rules out of thin air. “How are you going to find a murderer at a house party?”
“We think it’s my uncle.” He looked at her appraisingly. “You must be tired.”
She lifted her chin. “We?”
“Montgomery, Trevillion, and Harte—Makepeace, that is.”
She stared at him in horror, letting her arms drop. “You’ve trusted the Duke of Montgomery with your secret? Have you gone completely mad?”
“No, I’m just very desperate. Besides, I never told it to him—he somehow figured it out on his own.” He took a breath. “Lily, I don’t want to talk of this right now. I want to…” He sat up and pushed his hands through his hair. “You know what I’m charged with?”
“If I hadn’t before this night, I would after that dinner,” she said tartly.
He stared at her, licking his lips. “You must know that I didn’t do it.”
She gave him her profile. “Must I?”
“Lily…”
“You left us without word.”
“They were watching the garden,” he replied, his voice steady. “I couldn’t get you a message without the soldiers realizing you knew me.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said, and her face was harder than he’d ever seen it. “If you’d truly wanted to, you could have smuggled a message to Maude as she shopped or given it to one of the gardeners, or found a thousand other ways.”
He simply looked at her. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he could’ve gotten her word if he’d only tried hard enough. But he’d been busy with the plan, with the knowledge that until he could come to her a free man, he had nothing at all to offer her.
His very silence seemed to be some sort of answer to her. She lifted her chin proudly. “If we meant anything to you, you’d have gotten us word that you were alive.”
“You mean a great deal to me,” he said, low.
“Do we?” she asked, her mouth tight. “Truly? And yet you left us—me—without word or warning.”
“Lily…”
“I thought we were friends.”
He rose in one movement. “I thought we were more than friends.”
Her eyes widened and she backed up a step, seemingly without conscious thought, as he advanced on her, until her bottom hit the door.